Chillin with the ladies

Our favorite female vocalists of 2014 had a part two and this was going to be it. But so many of them were downtempo electronic, so we decided to make something more specific out of it, and brought in some older tracks.

Our electro relaxations has been our most popular playlist to date, other than the beats to blaze to, and we always wanted to include female vocals over the relaxations. And here it finally is…

This got funk

Well, funk is back, at least for us. One T’s Audible took our interest in electro funk and pushed it into something more funk electro (emphasis on the funk).

Audible is actually a reinterpretation of One T’s collaboration with Kentaroxiii & Toma Love Child. One T pitched down his verse from the original and brought in Josh Jar’s guitar. And damn if that guitar don’t make this funk, on the highs & the lows.

Listened to way too much music this year

I’ve listened to way too much music this year, probably around 12,000 new tracks (I tried calculating it). Most of the music was.. unfinished, to say the least, but we found a lot more songs worth keeping than any year before it.

A lot of new music emerged or reemerged over the year. Deep house was the big thing, but many discredit it because of the hype. It had its bad with itsgood. Our favorite new style goes to what doesn’t seem to have an official name yet. I’ve heard many call it kawaii, but I prefer vapor – this naming shit is more important than you’d think.

We’ve got 30 songs to show off, 11 artists and 20 playlists for you, but if that’s not enough… wait ’til next year.

Ain't no party like a dance party.

I’ve gone to a handful of EDM shows & festivals over the last year and I just don’t get how people can dance to most of the popular shit these days (says the hipster music blogger). At least not when you’ve got such better music to dance to (also hipster). So obviously we had to put a list together (very hipster).

Our Dance Party mix for 2014 is geared more towards the club or house party rather than the rave. I guess that’s where we differ from the higher BPM, bombastic music dominating EDM right now.

We get into various forms of house music on here, but there’s plenty of other influences as well — I’m being vague because I just spent way too much of my time putting together this list and I don’t have time to articulate it (like always).

Name may've been booted, but UK Garage still wins

Our last deep house list tacked on UK garage at the end, it does take over much of these lists, but as industry standards go it’s all deep house now. Though most of the house here has some influences from garage — grimier sounds with emphasis off the beat.

Creativity over quality

Sometimes it’s more about the creativity than the quality in a remix. Some of these aren’t perfect, but they show a lot of potential. And that’s another good reason for remixing, to get producers just starting out vocals actually worth making something new out of.

This is our biggest remix playlist yet. We tried hard to remove as much as we could, I mean that’s our job, but let me tell you it’s just as hard, if not harder, removing tracks from a playlist than adding them in (as we mentioned in our how to playlist music article).

Hip hop in the house

I’ve been telling cats like Doja that the people you surround yourself with will make or break your career. I’m sure Cali Swag District didn’t imagine a production like this on their ‘Twerk It’ track, but synth goes well with their rap.

It’s not about the synth though. It’s that DHB let a new sound into some decent rap.

When anime & electronic got together

Vapor is not really a style or genre. We got it from vaporwave, which most closely sounds like PUPANG’s Zane, but our list seems to be more electro influenced than vaporwave’s housey-synth sound.

The most common theme among all this vaporness is the cultural Japanese references, mainly inspired by anime & video games, and has an almost kiddish quality to it… which I warn you many won’t like. It’s not for everyone, as with most of our lists, but I dig the hell out of this sound.

or my daily music routine

As much as musicians don’t like to be classified under one sound, their songs have similarities that are best expressed in easily digestible playlists. We’ve focused on playlisting for the past 6 months, yet we’re still trying to figure out what works best.

There doesn’t seem to be any guide out there, so thanks to SF MusicTech we got off our ass and did it ourself. Or at least the start of something.

This article doesn’t focus so much on the art of playlisting, but rather how best to research and set up your playlists. We use SoundCloud as the platform, but it can be easily applied anywhere else.